Author, Musician, Researcher, Educator, Exiled Brooklynite

Religion

2011.01.11

Five years ago, I taught a class I loved at USC called "Music as Communication." I've substantially revamped the syllabus, and am now teaching "Musical Cultures and Industries" to my Rutgers undergrads this Spring.

Below is a draft of the syllabus. I welcome your comments.

1/18: Introduction

1/25: I Am What I Play: Music and Identity

Turnbull, C. M. (1968). The Forest People. Chapter 4, pp 73-93.

Lipsitz, G. (1990). Cruising around the historical bloc: postmodern and popular music in East Los Angeles. In K. Gelder and S. Thornton (Eds.), The Subcultures Reader. pp. 350-359.

2008.11.05

Smarterfolks than me have long realized that musical innovation often seems to precede social and political change. Even back in the day, Plato warned that "when modes of music change, the fundamental laws of the State always change with them."

A large portion of my research in recent years has attempted to apply this premise to new forms of digital and sample-based music, especially the mash-up -- a musical form that combines several preexisting recordings into a new composition/performance that is both completely derivative and completely original.

Today, basking in the glow of last night's ecstatic coup d'etat, it occurred to me that Barack Obama's ascent to the presidency is (thus far) the defining political manifestation of the mash-up aesthetic/ethic. Or, to put it another way, the man is himself a walking mash-up.

Obviously, there's the racial angle -- with a black African father and a white Kansan mother, he is a living rejection of the American racial binary. By the way, this transgressing of ethnic and cultural lines is also a fundamental, and conscious, goal of the mash-up ethic. As DJ Adrian of Bootie told me, "The audience [at our club] is so mashed up, like the music, and that’s [what] we’re most proud of."

But there are other mashed-up aspects of Obama, as well. His rhetoric is equal parts MLK and Harvard Law. His social agenda combines the "personal responsibility" and "family values" mantras of mainstream (pre-Bush) conservativism with pro-choice, pro-civil rights liberalism. His persona is both young and old, immigrant and native son, Christian, Muslim, and rational humanist. He is both a political insider, a scion of the Chicago Democratic machine, and consummate outsider, a first-term senator with a platform built on "change." He is from Hawaii, Kansas, Illinois, Kenya, and Indonesia. He is both "Barry" and "Hussein."

Critics have suggested that Obama's multifacetedness is just a blind, that he's a chimerical Zelig figure, a screen against which we hopeless optimists project our wildest fantasies.

Maybe.

But I think he's more mash-up than chimera. Like "Smells Like Booty," "Careless or Dead," or -- most obviously -- the Grey Album, Obama is far more than the sum of his parts. His unique juxtaposition of cultural and political logics creates a meta-logic that reveals the deeper truths uniting these seemingly disparate strands, and exposes some of our deepest beliefs to be nothing more than self-fulfilling prophecies of self-negation.

Our categories have bound us for too long. It's time for us to become a full-spectrum society, made of fully realized individuals. Mash-ups give us a template for understanding how society needs to evolve, and Obama has given us the hope that we can get there.